Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
soatok.blog
soatok.blog
Props to the author for highlighting this.
As a result, everyone peacefully self-selected into their preferred employment relationships. Companies got the type of workforce they wanted and workers chose the type of environment they wanted. It was great.
Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why. We should just return to the status quo before COVID: choose the type of company you want to work for that supports the lifestyle you want to have. If your employer wants to transition back to in-office work and you don't want to do it, switch to one of the thousands of companies that will hire you.
You have no obligation to stay at a company that is forcing you back in the office, and the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
The hypocrisy is obvious, they were all so against WFH before COVID, demanding data that it would work. Now it's working fine for three years, and yet they switch to office with no data, a simple "gut feeling" argument. It's indeed bullshit.
When I was in an office full time, I had to work my life around my work. When I have forty hours to fill out over a seven day period, I'm working my work around my life.
You're being too kind. Whims aren't the problem, lack of imagination is (and in leadership positions that should be unacceptable).
The problem is, few of the RTO office execs have WFH long enough to understand it. They have no clue how to lead WFH. They have no clue how to manage WFT. And they're not interested in learning new tricks. They simply wield their power and reinstate the status quo.
In a word...weak.
The RTO v WFH debate (?) is an opportunity in the market. An opportunity where WFH is the new up and coming opportunity. RTO is all but a fax machine. Who would feel comfortable working at a company where the executives lacked imagination and are all but mandating "Bring back the fax machine"?
- The UK team wants a noon (their time) meeting? Sure, I'll do it at 6am my time vs the SF team doing it at 4am.
- That NYC customer wants us to present at 9am ET? Sure, I'll do it at 8am my time vs the SF's team at 6am.
- Need someone to cover that meeting in Atlanta/DC/Dallas/Houston/Chicago? Sure, you can take a 3+ hour(+2-3 timezone) flight to cover it or I can just hop over in a fraction of the time.
After a while, I got ALL of the East Coast and European calls simply out of convenience.
I'm never going back, and have shut down plenty of recruiters and headhunters with one simple phrase: "100% remote."
So no, to say it's "bullshit and everyone knows it" is just pushing for some agenda. I wish everyone can have their way, if you don't want to come to the office then don't, employers should make it possible, but don't make it sound as if everyone hates it, it's just wrong.
I don't mind going to the office a fair share of the time but I don't want rules that require N days per week because that prevents me from visiting my partner. I generally work from my partner's place about 1-2 out of every 8 weeks. Going to the office as little or as much on other weeks isn't a huge issue (though admittedly I do work more efficiently from home, and have way better snacks and drinks at home than the office) but I want those 1-2 weeks to be respected.
Tried the cube life, didn't like it, company happily re-allocated my veal fattening pen to another drone during the heady pre-COVID days when such real estate was scarce.
There are too many social, economic, and ecological reasons to put a stake in the heart of requiring people to be in a specific location unless there's an honest to goodness requirement.
now the market is packed with applicants and the backlash is making it harder.
>Ultimately, never choose the one giving you an ultimatum.
This is such great advice. When you are given an ultimatum it is very revealing. Pretend to comply as the author advises, then find something else.
Your sense of self-worth is more valuable than salary or position prestige. If you comply long term, you lose a part of your self and persona.
The latter is an ultimatum, there's no way around that. Whether or not the ultimatum is reasonable depends entirely on the specifics, especially in the workplace, employers have expectations which they need to have met.
It's especially distasteful to bake in the assumption that a romantic partner setting conditions to stay in a relationship is automatically being abusive. If someone is presented with an ultimatum to quit problem drinking or lose their partner, which is more likely: that the partner is abusive or that the other partner is an alcoholic? It's certainly not automatic that it's the former!
A policy of never meeting an ultimatum is one way to live your life, I prefer to consider whether the demands are reasonable and proceed on that basis. For me it shows a stronger sense of self worth to consider this kind of thing on the merits, rather than pre-committing to stick to my guns, which is in effect a counter-ultimatum. Sometimes that's the right move, sometimes it isn't.
"Honey, playing WoW 12 hours a day is a dealbreaker for me."
"You must enter your information into our new HR system."
author’s advice, if taken literally, is to homestead? not that i don’t get the appeal — i just don’t think very many are actually cut out for that.
So while I like the concept of this advice, its hard to execute in practice. I'd adjust it to "never choose the one who is unwilling to discuss and come to a compromise"
If you are quitting your job as coach of the New England Patriots during your losing season don't expect to get $20/million year at your next job after you did your worth searching.
"I don't want to lose myself babe!"
On an assembly line everyone needed to be in sync but this generally isn’t true for most office work. You need to be present at the factory to do the work, hasn’t been true for office work for awhile now.
Yet we still operate synchronously. Everyone commutes through traffic/crowded public transport and risk catching the latest novel virus, to arrive at work at the same time. Everyone has lunch at the same time so it’s crowded as heck and we get even more mortal danger.
Perhaps if everyone working from home were constantly available to screen-share/video chat it wouldn't be as bad, but my experience with WFH is people get distracted by kids/pets/etc and half the time I wait hours for a response required for me to continue my work. At one point during the pandemic I had 6 cascading tasks going in parallel based solely on needing something to do while I twiddled my thumbs waiting for the required SME to come online (we charge by the hour, so I can't just be idle and charge it). In the office I just walk over to their desk. This is from the perspective of an engineer by the way, I'm not management.
This is an example of a local maximum. This form of communication is better for the person doing the walking, but worse when looked at through most other frames:
- worse for the person being asked, who was interrupted
- worse for the people who weren't privy to that conversation but perhaps could have learned or contributed except that they were OOO that moment.
- worse for the organization because knowledge shared this way is ephemeral & siloed by definition
- ineffective in large organizations, where teams often span offices
And all that's before considering the "worse" that comes from having your staff spend 5 hours a week (average in the US) commuting to the office.
In effect, the person walking over is burdening the other party and the organization rather than spend a little more time to craft a question in writing. Weak written communication skills are at the root of why so many organizations are bad at remote work. If oral communications is all that works at your org, then remote is going to be really tough for you (and your inter-office communication is also probably terrible and you should put the whole company in a single building).
If I'm forced to commute to and work in an office 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, then I will be more miserable, lament my job, and thus be less productive towards my day job. I will feel more like a wage slave worker bee who has little autonomy over their work, having to regress to the humiliating dynamic of having to ask my boss for "permission" to work from home. As a night owl, I'll be forced to conform my sleep schedule to the CEO's, and still show up bright and early on days where I didn't get enough sleep, and look busy until 5:30pm+ - maybe stretching out work that could've been done in a few hours to an entire work day because when you're stuck in an office there's little incentive to work faster since you're trapped their all day regardless. When I'm finally sick of it all I'll accept the offer for that remote-friendly company that doesn't care what time I wake up, what hours I work, or where I work, just that the work I produce is high quality.
If I have the flexibility to WFH, not waste hours/day commuting, and live wherever makes me happiest (as opposed to the city my company happens to have an office in, which is probably a city like NYC or SF which may not be my preference), then I will be happier with my employment arrangement, more productive, and more loyal. Also I personally find it easier to accomplish deep work when working under my own conditions, as opposed to some open office with no privacy, constant chatter, and the drudgery of wage slaves who clearly don't want to be there but have no choice.
There are far too many variables at play to be able to make that kind of blanket statement with such confidence.
The reason it isn't, for me, is that I'm usually answering questions about Why we do something, or How something is supposed to work. I'm usually giving a quick response, with a link to a design, or a code snippet, or a git commit, or a Code Review link, or something online. So I have to provide an online response whether you ask me in person or not.
If I'm in a 1:1, yea I totally agree I'd rather just talk about career growth and that stuff in person. But.... I mean now we are walking down the already-well-discussed path of Manager/IC and how these jobs are just different.
I don't know for sure, but I think this is the experience of many senior developers.
[edit] > I twiddled my thumbs waiting for the required SME to come online
I mean, this isn't an RTO discussion. If your SME is slacking off that is a different problem. Assuming best intentions, you would walk up to that SME's desk and there would already be 5 people waiting with a question because the SME can only talk to 1 person at a time.
I can slack with several different folks, so long as they can just wait a second while I type. The worst people (so sorry, there are some great TAMs) are the ones who page you as soon as they need something because they don't understand you are busy with a different project.
Screen sharing or pairing are better remote than in person.
In person’s good for a subset of types of meetings that some folks may find themselves in a lot. Brainstorming, product ideation, that kind of thing.
> In the office I just walk over to their desk. This is from the perspective of an engineer by the way, I'm not management.
One of the best things about WFH is this doesn’t happen.
Having multiple tasks on the go is good. I did it even when I worked in an office; it seems common practice to have many active repos hot on disk.
Now imagine working on an assembly line on your feet all day versus your office day job. The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.
I personally hated going into the office, but the morale effect is real.
I think the main thing is people cannot be trusted to honestly tell you if they work better from the office. It's a nicer life working from home but whether you get more work done is debatable. And there is always too much to lose by speaking the truth.
Apropos username.
So yeah, of course corporate politicians want RTO. Exercising power in a WFH company, even when they still hold power over someones life, is an abstract, intellectual thing. But the people who need power, need it at an emotional, visceral level. They need those IRL interactions to satisfy their ID. It's gross, but it needs to be said because some people are sweet and naive to the nature of those who pursue power.
And even grosser, men specifically often pursue careers of power with an additional motivation: They get something out of their professional relationships with women that they can't get from their non-professional relationships with women. They can get this without breaking the law, upsetting HR, or even do something worthy of being canceled. I'm glad we live in an era where most of these sharks are afraid to prey, but throwing young people in a shark infested waters is still... well, quite a bit more than just bullshit. IMO, pandering to these mediocre monsters is morally indefensible. Especially accounting for the environmental impacts (doubling of personal co2 emissions.)
Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer all married subordinates, and Elon Musk had children with an employee
The market will settle it in the end, but at least for startups being colocated is a competitive advantage.
Star ICs crushing it at remote work doesn't mean star teams; and if their coworkers are avoiding them in reviews it does sound like there are communication issues at play.
And don't forget that these companies all have policies of not hiring high-level ICs from the outside. So if you're at that level, your options to jump ship can be quite limited unless your current employer is truly toxic. Again, a practice designed to keep comp at the top IC bands down.
good luck competing with that.
source: 25 years and 8+ companies working remotely.
People who can just easily get another job and are just engineer interview ready at all points aren't exactly the majority.
good luck competing with that.
source: 25 years and 8+ companies working remotely, and obliterating competitors stuck in the old ways.
You can get part of this for 'free' if you shove everyone in a room.
You can also get this if you invest in strong remote culture that encourages lots of remote collaboration.
Source: I've been at a remote-first startup that is kicking ass over the last two years. In-office is available but remains entirely optional.
like "The market" is some rational, logical all-knowing, all-wise higher force.
"The market" is a bunch of rich assholes that act in their own self interests.
They don't give a sh-t about you and they definitely don't give a sh-t about me.
Thus RTO improves group A performance while not affecting group B performance so it looks like a win overall and in a sense it is.
But it is penalizing group B, making their lives inconvenient, and increasing their expenditures.
Working from home is objectively better if your employees are in group B: (1) better for the environment [less transit], (2) leads to better work-life balance [no time lost to commute, more flexible work hours], (3) is more cost efficient [no need to rent offices in high cost areas, remote employees can be cheaper as their COL is often lower], (4) lets employees have better homes [because you don't need to be near the downtown core].
I think if you start remote and you measure performance of your employees, you can ensure that you get most group B employees and you can stay remote. The issue is if you started in the office, you have a mix of group B and group A, and RTO will improve the average employee performance, so it makes sense.
As someone who has worked remote long before COVID, there's another layer to this issue: Many of the people who think they are in Group B (work well from home) are actually in Group A (struggle at home) but they are resistant to recognizing it.
Prior to the pandemic, remote companies all understood that not everyone who wants to work form home can actually be productive at home. For some reason the pandemic WFH push made everyone forget that, and we started assuming that anyone who wants to work from home is good at working from home. Predictably, a lot of companies saw a huge increase in issues, panicked, and force every to RTO.
It's a challenging issue because the problems aren't immediately obvious. We had some very productive programmers who just couldn't WFH because they were hostile in text chat but very cordial in person. Others would spend entire works grinding away at problems in isolation that could have been solved with 1 hour of communication because they think WFH == freedom to isolate from others.
Many of these things can be trained out with good management and mentoring, but only when it's introduced gradually. The pandemic WFH push opened the floodgates to everyone, with predictable results.
I hope we go back to wide acceptance of WFH, however with the understanding that it's not for everyone. Some people can't handle it even though they like it.
Note that this is not necessarily true. US cities were for a while "NIMBYism vs mandatory commutes". To the extent that one is solved but not the other, we get more car-centric spraw. People commuting less can be offset with them doing more pleasure driving.
(Obvious this depends on the metro area, more remote work in Phoenix Arizona is definitely net good, in NYC not so much.)
Once we solve the NIMBY problem, I'll be a lot more comfortable with the society-wide implications of remote work, but for now it is reducing the impetus to solve a problem that needs to be solved anyways.
1. Hire within a general metropolitan area (2 hour commute max).
2. WFH for 28 days a month.
3. 2 days a month the entire org convenes in a ballroom or something and works together, have some progress reports, happy hours and hackathons.
In this model, everyone’s remote most of the time. Yet everyone gets FaceTime with each other IrL. Seed ideas and brainstorms. Everyone’s happy. I think. Curious if anyone has a critique.
What I've seen work, which I think still hits your goals of occasional face time, is to have a quarterly offsite for the whole company. Everyone works remotely, but once a quarter you find a nice location that is easy for everyone to get to, pay for their flights and hotels (and if you're really nice, their family too, or at least child care at home while they are gone), and then have a couple of days of quarterly planning, hacking sprints, and general social activities that don't involve alcohol or strenuous physical activity (but if people want to organize that for themselves they are welcome to do so).
I actually prefer to be in the office if I live near the office. But being able to live in the city that lets me support my spouse's career is non-negotiable for me.
I like the fun of being able to just joke around with coworkers around you. I obviously don’t want to bother anyone that prefers uninterrupted focus though. The ability to choose WFH or office self selects for people like me to come in. Makes for a much more fun office environment post-COVID IMO.
Forcing everyone into the office, even for 2 days, means you’re going to have 75% of people just annoyed they have to come in for 2 days. What have you gained? Everyone is unhappy.
Single metro area destroys a lot of the benefit to workers of WFH. It's not about not going to the office. It's about breaking real state.
You're also losing a big benefit to the employer: the ability to hire the best talent from a pool of 300+ million people instead of those in just one metro area.
This plan gets you the downsides of WFH, namely that it's harder to casually communicate, without the upsides to either yourself or the employee. Go all-in on remote or don't.
BTW the difference in real estate cost between say the SF Bay Area and most of the rest of the USA is so great it'd be cheaper to fly everyone to SF every 30-60 days than to pay the salary premium to afford housing there. (... and it's not like employees are pocketing that salary... it all goes to real estate.)
1. Individuals and teams can work in whatever way is most productive for them.
2. On a day to day basis, everyone who’s in the office is there because they want to be there, not because their boss requires them to be there. Speaking from experience, this leads to way better energy at the office.
3. Yes, you’re restricting hiring to a single geographical area. But for a small startup in a tech hub that’s not an issue, there’s plenty of talent around, you just have to convince them they should work for you.
4. People will want to work for you, because they’ll appreciate not only the flexibility, but the fact that you’re treating them like adults who can manage their own working practices. I’ve told several recruiters this year something to the effect of “I’d only be looking to move for a role with more scope and autonomy, and if I can’t be trusted with a decision as simple as where to work from, this role probably doesn’t offer the level of autonomy I’d be looking for.”
At a larger scale you might have to branch out to multiple hubs, but I think having departments or at least functional teams colocated but with flexible work arrangements is a huge advantage over the alternatives.
more seriously: I assume you plan to pay for hotel rooms?
also: why 2 hours max? If you're paying for one night in a hotel, then surely you could pay for 2 nights, making 3 or more hours feasible.
Some people come in a few days a week in other weeks as well. Some really only come in those two days. A small number of people nearly never come in (always dial in). It doesn't seam related to travel time, more to personal preference for being out of the house / in an office.
As a remote worker, I'm perfectly happy travelling every so often for in-person meetings and offsites. That's not a problem for me.
There are no large tech companies within 30 minutes of where I live. I don't want to move away from my house or the people I share it with (whose jobs are not portable).
Does anyone have a workplace where it is really seamless, high resolution, and just works? Or is using any of these new technologies?
Maybe VR will help...
But not being in-person for collaboration/morale is miles apart.
I wonder if employees would personally cover the cost of a one week meetup once per month if their other option was move city and office all the time.
I’ve been using FaceTime Audio to communicate with family on the other side of the world and it’s incredible. Zero latency and great audio quality. It’s an extremely underrated piece of tech. Not sure about FaceTime video as I’ve never used it, but I bet it’s equally impressive.
Amazing that no one else was able to solve this problem considering the demand for such software during the pandemic. Not my area of expertise, but I assume it must be quite difficult.
Google. It was good even before the pandemic. We used to video call each other between buildings 100 feet apart instead of walking over.
I do agree that collaboration is much more productive when remote.
Nearly all of my exciting office "collaborations" end up feeling great then they're happening, but in retrospect, almost always fizzle out after a small window of time. I like onsites for the energy and socialization, but even then I always find most of the work happens back in the hotel room at night, and real planning happens after everyone is back at home. I can't imagine working that way all the time.
Whereas all of my remote collaborations are well documented while they're happening. Typically we have some kind of shared note taking, and writing code collaboratively, etc. Doesn't feel as social sometimes, but tends to be a much larger impact.
Likewise Open Source software has been largely written by remote people since long before the advent of even video conferencing. Git was originally written with the design intention that kernel hackers could work on a plane (per airplane wifi) without requiring a centralized server to communicate with.
> Video conf still sucks. It's literally the same as 10 years ago.
I still marvel at this. I've been working remote for nearly 15 years now and I honestly don't feel that video conferencing has improved noticeably.
* * W R F
M T W * *
Also some workers stagger their schedules and share rent on an apartment that is a “crash pad”, so they can live farther from the metro and then just commute for the two day office visit in one trip.
Pretty interesting seeing how people adapt to this.
Audio calls also still suck. Commercials in the 90s advertised "crystal clear audio quality" - they stopped talking about it but it never materialised.
Nah employers paying out of pocket makes so much more sense for this arrangement, just pay the remote worker less and make it clear they need to come in for one week a month. It's basically the same thing.
The question is, does your organization actually know the value of communication between remote parties? Companies that actually run the numbers on the value of remote collaboration can pretty easily figure out if it's worth it.
We meet in person once or twice a year, but the in-person experience is not significantly different.
I agree it sucked Pre-Covid, but now it just works. We mostly use Teams. We are RTO 2 days a week, but most work meetings are still in Teams. Demoing is way easier because you can simply share your screen rather than carrying your laptop to the various meeting rooms.
These companies know they could lose a lot of excellent talent, and backfill with mediocre talent. Their employer brand names will remain strong carry them through, with enough junior candidates that will backfill the "industry expert" and mostly nobody will notice.
I normally like strong opinions even when I disagree with them. It is usually refreshing to hear people share their true feelings in an unfiltered way.
This, on the other hand, feels bitter. It seems to be coming from a place of hate.
By all means, stand up for yourself and your ideals. Sometimes you have to make difficult choices to maintain your own integrity. But, conversely, deciding to make the choice to return to an office is not "dehumanize yourself in submission".
Many people, perhaps most, will just go back to the office because they aren't convinced that they are locked in a life-long struggle to free themselves from some imaginary battle between the oppressors and the oppressed. They will realize that a job is an offering made to them, the conditions of which may change from time to time. Some will actually relish the idea of hanging around the office with likeminded coworkers.
This is a cancer of our times: to see every single thing that happens as one side being an asshole exerting power and the other side being dehumanized into submission.
Does it bother you that someone may actually hate something?
Of course is bitter. Dude said it clearly. Was hired as WFH before COVID, had challenging work, enjoyed it and then some asshole higher up, one day, decided to RTO indiscriminately for everyone.
And I didn't felt any hate, just disappointment. He was disappointed that he had to resign. Hence his rant. I would rant too in same shoes.
Why is it that remote workers never insist on everyone working from home, but RTO people want every single person to RTO? Just leave it up to the individual worker.
I totally by this might be a CEO power trip, but that doesn't also mean its an individualist ("I'm a star IC nothing else matter") brain rot. Star ICs do not a functioning org make.
If the in-person team doesn't like working remotely because they prefer to communicate and make decisions in-person, those conversations/decisions will have to be propagated to the remote team, for the company to function.
My gut feeling is that at some point, an important decision will be made in-person and not propagated, leading to confusion, lack of coordination, etc. Then, politics will ensue because the in-person team might feel like they're making concessions to the remote-team, and that the remote-team is always lagging behind, that the bulk of the decision-making responsibility are on the in-person team's shoulders, etc.
I'm 100% speculating, but I can see it happen.
I think for people in the Bay Area maybe this might not be the case. But other places in the world don't have the same kind of plethora of options.
For me, it's work remote, or take a massive paycut and work on far less interesting and satisfying work. But I also don't like working remote. So, yeah...
Count the times you see someone arguing WFH while admitting any degree of abuse like we all know it is.
To hear people here tell it, they would never do the things we all know happen.
They do insist that all meetings have some video conferencing on. Also, to avoid side conversations, many of them ask that everyone in the meeting - even those sitting the same office - sign into the video conferencing software.
If a company wants to increase productivity, then they should provide greater ownership and autonomy to workers, as well as better incentives such as profit sharing. If an engineer knows that they'll get a cut of the cost savings or profits of some project idea they have, then you can bet that many employees will take advantage of that to get valuable work done.
If I were running a company, I'd hire remotely from the global talent pool, and more importantly ensure that my employees are actually incentivized to get things done via ownership and profit sharing.
It's a shame that executives at big tech companies are opting for the authoritarian approach, and I firmly believe that that will be their downfall. There certainly is value to in-person collaboration, but forcing it via threats is absolutely not the right approach. A better way to incentivize workers returning to office would be via positive incentives (eg. more money, subsidized housing, free transportation) as opposed to negative threats (eg. firing people for not obeying the lord's commands)
I'm not so sure that this would work. The goal of your employer is to keep you working.
If the workforce participates to much, you could run into the Tesla problem, a.k.a. your early employees become millionaires and stop working (in case of Tesla because of company stocks).
A CEO at a major tech company makes more in a year than he will spend in a lifetime. The company becoming more or less productive won't affect their personal situation much. But forcing everyone into work does increase their power which is what they truly crave.
Until I see honesty on this, I am uninterested.
No one ever admits:
- I basically work 20-30 hours a week!
- They have no idea when I’m actually working.
- I was going to quit but I’m going to let them just keep paying me.
- I have at least one side job and I won’t be able to do it if I need to go back in.
I know YOU would never do these things. But we all know they occur, frequently.
It’s not a discussion or well reasoned refutation if you are just going to pretend that the issues don’t exist.
EDIT: No. I do not accept “they don’t work in the office either” as a valid argument. For the obvious reasons that at least in the office there is at least a chance to see it. For less obvious reasons like it’s still a body there, and seeing people work around you might make some people want to work. We are pack animals.
All you are doing with the argument that they “don’t work anyway” is telling me they shouldn’t be allowed to WFH or even be employed in the first place. It’s not a good argument.
That, at least to me, seems to be the big elephant in the room that no-one wants to address.
Office workers are not productive 100% of the time, every single minute at work. I've worked manual labor where we actually worked every single minute, sans 15 minute breaks every 3 hours, but never in an office setting. Even white-collar workers that are putting in 80 hour weeks are spending a good time of that just waiting, pretending to work, and just doing otherwise "unproductive" things.
A lot of employers simply want their "moneys worth" of your time. They'd rather you be unproductive at work than home.
Wow, that's really efficient. Most office workers probably get 12-20 hours of real work done in a week!
They also had time to move all across the country.
More like 15-20 for me personally, and it's usually around 5-10 hours of actual work if I'm forced to come to the office on the other hand! Also why is this a bad thing, assuming all the work gets completed as it should? Is there something magical that happens once you've hit that arbitrary 40 hour limit where it suddenly counts as real work, or do you just get your rocks off by wasting your employee's lives on frivolous, mind-numbing thumb twirling?
> They have no idea when I’m actually working
They have no idea when I'm in the office either. Hell, my team is way less productive on our mandatory team days than we are when we're each at home, since we spend the majority of the day just chatting and not actually getting work done (my manager included).
Being physically present in the office != working, and anyone who thinks they can detect the people slacking off in person but not online are just delusional.
> I was going to quit but I’m going to let them just keep paying me
Not sure what this one is even implying?
> I have at least one side job and I won’t be able to do it if I need to go back in
I don't personally, but again why does it matter if they're getting all their work done as is expected of them? Maybe pay them more than peanuts and they'll be happy to pretend to work for 40 hours for you, instead of being forced to take a sidegig to pay the bills.
- Decent working environment. I was moved into a single person office with another person that was so cramped I had to move if they needed to use the bathroom and ended up begging to be moved into the open office plan (which was so distracting but less humiliating.)
- Performance based bonuses/promotions
- Not working on weekends/holidays.
- Company Transit (a spot wasn't guaranteed or reservable so it wasn't reliable)
- 40 hour work week. Expected that I will go over 40 hours sometimes but under was taboo. And of course the 2 hours of commuting doesn't count.
- Plenty of other passive aggressive stuff by management during meetings
So I don't think people should feel that bad about negotiating the work environment on their terms. If companies don't follow the rules, why should people always be expected to fulfill your requirements that are something they never wanted.
As long as employers have no problem with subjecting people to bullshit dehumanizing hiring processes, tone-deaf ultimatums, showering executives with disgusting bonuses while buying back stock and laying off workers, etc etc etc, then I don't see a problem with any of the above.
I refuse to continue to normalize this idea that employers are allowed to be dicks and you the worker just have to suck it up.
I started remotely recently but I feel the company, which seems to be trying, struggles to give me meaningful work, or have colleagues available to collaborate and move it forward
I want to be in the office. Working remote is the most stressful thing I've ever done.
The point is, requiring everyone to feel that way is bullshit. This bell can't be unrung, and the successful places are the ones who can cater to both, which is good because it's not mutually exclusive. The term "return to office," just like the term "remote" are biased towards desire. Workplace independence is what those of us who don't want to go back in are looking for, and there's room enough for everyone. You can go in, I can stay home, we can work together.
The last bit matters, though, because you going in have to be accepting of those of us who don't want to. Yeah, you're gonna sit on Zoom calls still from the comfort of your cube, but at least at my company, we were doing that on Skype before anyway, we just all forgot. Any office with more than one building, or any company with a tolerant work from home policy, had at least one person not come in at a time, so voice calls were a requirement. It was never not that way, and it won't go back to the time before that when absence meant missing things.
Make If you want to go back and make us all go with you, now we have a problem. But please, go in to the office! Enjoy it, it's a nice place to be. Just not the only place.
People have been saying that over here on HN too.
It’s what they WANT to happen, but not at all what will happen.
It’s a feel good narrative based on the fact that engineers want to believe they are “top talent”, that their skills alone will be enough for them to do well economically, that in the end the people that don’t respect the tech will suffer consequences.
Sorry, “top talent” isn’t that scarce or NEEDED at all in software engineering. Even FAANG is more than happy to churn on 20 something college grads with no deep expertise. In fact, engineers with deep expertise who wants to work on challenging technical problems often have to take pay CUTS to be able to do so.
With no unions and no solidarity between workers, the future is clear: come back to the office or take a pay cut.
I'd love to be able to work remote as well, but I can still see some rational reasons why my employer wants us to stay in the office ...
That said, this article flirts with the often-made argument that RTO is some sort of way of boosting commercial property prices or tax incentives. I've never bought this and would be curious to see the argument steelmanned, since I don't think large corporations are going to easily fall into this sunk cost fallacy style thinking. If remote work boosts productivity and allows them to lower the costs of having offices, companies should embrace this even if they made prior investments in having offices.
Large employers, think Amazon in Seattle, often have special agreements with the city for taxes.
Without the employees coming in and supporting local businesses there's a decline in tax revenue and local govt threaten to take them away. (As well as play less ball with the larger employer on other things like permitting etc.)
For these large companies they want political power as well, and maybe want it more than a marginal boost in productivity from remote work.
They don't need innovation anymore. They need general competence to maintain a business model.
At the large scale company, a cryptography dept can live without an amazing expert. They'll hire some middling crypto people, and they'll generally be fine. These companies have some massive moat, and dethroning them from that moat would be a multi-generational effort.
So when he says "My Prediction"
> Every company that issued forced relocation ultimatums to their pre-pandemic remote workers will not only lose most (if not all) their top talent in the next year, but they will struggle to hire for at least the coming decade.
Their brands as big, stable companies will let them continue to hire boring, mediocre, but good-enough employees willing to relocate. That's my prediction.. Nothing big will really change.
Optimistically though the companies that need excellence over mediocrity are startups, and I'm hopeful it'll drive talent into that space to truly innovate beyond Amazon or whomever's latest TPS report
It’s so easy especially for coders (and I imagine other knowledge workers) to get into flame wars debating things when you’re only typing things out. Video calls help a little but not everyone wants to turn on their cameras and it’s easy to eventually get used to seeing people as mere tiles in a screen. People tend to be more careful when there’s a real human in front of them.
I was all for WFH at the start of the pandemic, it was awesome. I have switched my feelings on it to realize that 3x per week is a good compromise. I get the commercial real estate conspiracy, which I am sure has some impact on it, but I also think a lot of people have a similar view that I do. I don't think my view is revolutionary that in office collaboration has tangible benefits.
Also, inevitably remote/async work flips the priority such that employee would be much more responsive to interrupts/errands of their own life than to focus their full attention on the employer's concerns.
Which is how it should be. Life is a lot more than living for your employer.
If you like working in office, that's cool, I liked to do it when I was younger, but own the fact that it is a preference and not a superior position.
My direct peer whom I work with closely every day takes hours to respond when in the office, while at home it takes him a few minutes at most. PRs take 10x as long to get done when he's at the office (even on the rare occasion I'm in the office, it actually takes longer cause all he wants to do is just chat), the PRs themselves are of a lower quality and less useful etc...
> Also, inevitably remote/async work flips the priority such that employee would be much more responsive to interrupts/errands of their own life than to focus their full attention on the employer's concerns.
I mean, good? I prioritize a lot of things, arguably MOST things over work. If I had the option to do nothing yet still earn money you bet I'd do it, but since we don't live in a post-scarcity Utopia I will in the meantime give minimal effort and not let my job dictate how I live my life.
I believe that is the main thing that is so disturbing to these employers that lament remote work, not that productivity is affected.
That’s how I know it’s BS on both sides. No one has ever admitted they exploit it - but we all know it happens.
There are people making 1/5th what the author is making and somehow surviving in VHCOL areas.
Historically, violent conflicts notwithstanding, only people in already relatively comfortable positions are able to improve conditions for themselves and others, such as normalizing WFH, since the people stuck with 4hr commutes that can only pray that they can afford a full tank of gas that day won't have the time or energy to do so.
The author explicitly says they're not going to uproot their life to move to some expensive city, which presumably is much more than a cost of living argument.
It makes a great deal of sense for managers to check in with each employee for which remote is now the new normal. Perhaps either formalize the remote work as part of the job description or come up with a plan to return on a case-by-case basis.
It's absolutely bonkers to force people who were specifically hired as remote-workers prior to the pandemic to relocate.
Just let people do what they find the most productive and let their productivity speak for itself. If you can't properly measure productivity, then that's the issue you should focus on.
OK you want to work remote. Great, do that. Literally, it's great for you. Some people might not want that, some people might want to run companies where that doesn't happen. Don't work at those places.
But then you get to gems like this:
"If I had to give only one bit of advice to anyone ever faced with an ultimatum from someone with power over them (be it an employer or abusive romantic partner), it would be: Ultimately, never choose the one giving you an ultimatum."
Sure thing buddy. Are we talking about an ultimatum not to send creepy as fuck text messages to female colleagues, or not to start endless flame wars in the slack channel over minute technical bullshit that doesn't matter? Or just this topic? I thought we were generalizing.
"Conversely, if you let these assholes exert their power over you, you dehumanize yourself in submission."
Are we 14? Of course your employer has power over you. You also have power in the equation as well, and you're both very free to walk away or pursue other opportunities. How about just being an adult and negotiating for what you want?
What would I give to get that feeling...
> Ultimately, never choose the one giving you an ultimatum.
This is very good advice. Related, never trust a retention offer. The leverage you have to influence the change that it represents vanishes the moment you accept it
> don’t accept any relocation assistance
The number of people I've seen getting in trouble because they burnt a signing bonus before the minimum retention period, or forgot about the lawyer fees for their immigration paperwork and switched jobs too early. It's fine taking any of these as long as you accept that you're selling out for a couple of years... But read your contracts
> This outflow of money does hurt the local economies of said cities, including the ones that big tech companies are headquartered in. In some cases, this pain has jeopardized a lot of the tax incentives that said companies enjoy.
This is an explanation, others also related to financial incentives, some related to trust (a lot of managers don't trust that people are working when they can't directly see their screens).
I think there is also an argument to be made that wfh is not for everyone and everything, and that collaboration can work better in person. It's harder to build a team when most of your relationships are built in meetings. Seeing people once in a while is good to build trust, and I can get why some companies can take the position that this is a must have in their employment conditions.
Not that I would be interested to work for such a company though.
No commute.
Disabled people can work.
Less micro plastics in the environment from car tires.
Potentially lower greenhouse emissions.
No office means no costs from rent, heating/cooling, cleaning, furniture, etc etc.
Spending time around your family. (Although on that last one, I really dislike kids screaming in the background of conference calls)
Edited to add: I wonder how to compare energy usage or emissions? You have less road and office use, but more home use.
I'm puzzled by the people in this thread that seem to be saying "everyone must RTO because I want to". It's great that you personally want to work in an office and I wish you every success, but why drag people to the office if they want to work from home?
And in a John Stewart Mill way, list the negatives in their most sincere and effective forms by the people that truly believe them. Not just your take that you happen to easily to refute.
Steelman RTO from the point of a company dealing with WFH abuse and I’ll think you are more serious.
Having said all that, the author misses the point on tax incentives being the driver of this. I know of many situations where the employer could care less about tax incentives and the overall cost of the return to office mandate. If they cared about money, they would sell or tear down their corporate HQs like many have. For some, its about what the c-level believes will make them successful. You can argue they are right or wrong in their belief, I'm in the wait and see camp of what this looks like in five years to see what we learn by trying different things.
Take the argument of working in a cheaper state or country. These kind of perks that only IT people have, can easily turn into envy with the majority of the other workers who do not have this. They may need to commute hours every day and still need to pay grand villa rent for a basement room.
> If your employer tells you, “Move to an expensive city or resign,” your best move will be, in the end, to quit. Notice that I said, in the end. It’s perfectly okay to pretend to comply to buy time while you line up a new gig somewhere else.
Edit: if you’re going to downvote me that’s fine, but please explain why “number of hours spent at computer” is at all a useful metric. It’s a genuine question; I’m not being facetious. I’ll get nothing done all day then wake up in the middle of the night with the solution to a problem. The amount of time I spend coding doesn’t really correlate with business value.
If you are an employer and someone manages to stay employed under your leadership while having multiple jobs, that's on you.
It's weird to demand from your employer when you're in control of where you work.
> It’s perfectly okay to pretend to comply to buy time while you line up a new gig somewhere else.
The context of this was the writer receiving an ultimatum, and perhaps feeling that the employer was being abusive, so maybe it was OK then.
But I'd hope people don't take that assertion of "it's perfectly okay to pretend to comply" as blanket advice.
For example, imagine a team that, although some coked-up CEO did something obnoxious, the team believed the key teammate who said they were relocating. Then later the team learns the person was lying to them, which they relied upon, so they were left in a bad spot that could've been avoided.
> Many of them admitted that they were actively looking for new roles; some of them for the first time in over a decade. Many of them already have new gigs lined up, and were preparing to resign too. Some of those already have.
OPSEC. You can act in good faith with your employer and not loose-lips-sink-ships your colleagues on their own delicate situations.
Maybe better trust among colleagues on delicate things like this would've helped avoid the other problem: there would be less motivation to "pretend", if the person could trust their colleagues not to rat them out when they don't say anything rather than lie, or when they even hint at their plans.
I think the chance they are sinking their buddies is unlikely. It sounds like this is already some time in the rearview and it's not like they exposed any direct info by saying "I've heard from other engineers"
How few people in history have been able to travel to exotic places or visit far-off friends and family, while still making decent money, and do this almost as much as they want (supposing lifestyle and relationships that allow this, which is true for many people). I mean, people in tech who vacation in tropical climes then spend cherished time with parents and siblings and friends living thousands of miles away, and don't worry about running out their vacation time: dozens of weeks of cherished traveling, if that's what you want! Along the way developing fundamentally different types of family relationships or accruing worldly sophistication.
Forget about little medical or technological things that mark a break from the past: lots of people can afford tylenol and iPhones and Spotify. This is a class marker of epic proportion. This is a way of life that Tolstoy ascribed to the very wealthiest of Moscow's aristocratic families and bachelors (most certainly not even all of the aristocratic class).
visiting family without concern about impact to work is nice, but eventually you just really want a consistent place where you can be productive
That a large number of CEOs/Executives/management etc are actually useless and achieve nothing; the impact that they have on the business is incredibly minimal and sometimes they are even a detriment to overall function.
Look at your typical CEO of a large-ish company: what do they actually do? The business has presumably hired many clever employees with various skills and they already know how to do their jobs well. The CEO is only there to solve fabricated problems, such as one business only doing deals with another if the two CEOs went to a private boarding school together so they can shake hands after a three martini lunch.
Of course because people are people I have to include "of course this doesn't mean _all_ CEOs & management" (duh), but certainly a very large number of them.
Eyyyy, article author is a furry, too! :3
He's not a fennec fox, unfortunately. Can't all be perfect.
What's less clear is whether WFH productivity is relatively high because it leverages structures and relationships that were established pre-pandemic, when working from the office was the norm. It'll be interesting to see what the results of studies a few years down the road show, when there's more data and better metrics.
Hasn't there been a massive amount of turnover since the pandemic began?
Reserving floating desks. Insufficient office space for the number of employees (because they overhired in 20/21). Declining quality of local employer options generally. A more hostile environment overall. Before I left Google it was clear that the rather nice environment we had before was never coming back. So without the perks, and the pleasant... why stay other than money? I decided I'd rather just cut spending. (Obviously others don't necessarily have these options)
I don't actually like working remote (though I don't miss the commute). But the only way to get meaningful work and work that pays decently for me now is remote.
I think many employers doing mandatory RTO are overplaying their hand and they will suffer for it. Or they are giving a clear signal of the values that actually hold in their workplace, and so basically telling picky and probably higher quality senior talent to stay away.
Is this true? I've never heard of conditional assistance like this.
Ask your tax person first, of course.
Being in the office does have benefits (e.g. if you're a more junior employee or have trouble focusing at home)
Of course it has cons as well,it's up to an individual person whether or not the pros outweigh the cons
A C-level executive making some sort of change without any good reason always sucks, but one should really know better than to call the CEO of one's previous company an asshole in public. It's unprofessional and will reflect badly on you.
Plus, the advice about never taking an ultimatum is... weird. The author doesn't even seem to notice the apparent contradiction between stating this and them later commenting on immigrants not being able to be as picky.
> apparent contradiction
I don't understand what you mean. Where's the contradiction? OP saying "never take an ultimatum" isn't absolute - there's an implied "in your best interest" there. If a cop tells you "freeze or I'll shoot!" do you ignore that ultimatum? Of course not, context matters. Obviously an H1B trying to support a family is going to most likely choose to comply with the ultimatum in the best interest of their quality of life. It's just unfortunate they have far less negotiation room.
Firstly, I think it's ok that some companies are 100% remote, some are 100% office, some are mixed; potential employees choose based on their wants and needs. Personally I like mixed. I'd never do 100% remote or office again for sure.
Second, I think this "choose the company who isn't giving you the ultimatum" makes sense only when there's a choice. For a long time developers have had a huge amount of leverage as the market was so they the ones making the ultimatums. I can see that not being the case in the near future.
If the job can be done remotely and async - it potentially can be done from anywhere. Potentially this means you are competing globally for that job.
And I suspect for most of the people on these boards there are lots of places which have both the talent and much lower costs.
So in a completely free market you might find that choosing where you live is no longer an advantage of remote working - to compete you'll need to move to a country that has lower costs....
So there is an element of being careful what you wish for.
I can confirm that big tech companies are operating like wile-e-coyote after he has run off the cliff, but hasn’t looked down yet.
Some are even de-resourcing non-HQ offices (full of impossible to replace specialists, especially if you limit the search to the HQ city).
So, some teams were forced to return to office, but will never receive additional headcount or backfills.
Rest assured I’m keeping track of which companies are doing this (I live in an HQ city), and won’t consider interviewing at them in the future.
Beside this humble brag is the realization that the author is atypical. That is, their experience with remote work and return-to-office experiences may be very different from that of the typical American tech worker.
If everyone knows that return-to-office is bullshit why is there no data? If remote work is a great idea then why did so few companies adopt it after being forced to implement it during the pandemic? Virtually every company with offices in one form or another required their employees to show up at the office regularly (including my place of work). I don't have any data, but I'm assuming that most of these companies must have seen some productivity decrease or something or else they would have closed their expensive offices for good and let everyone work from home.
At the very least the pandemic was not enough to demonstrate the "obvious" benefits of work from home over work from office.
You're right, no one is sharing that data. But I think it's a pretty significant assumption that the decision to return to the office must therefore be being made based on some secret data and informed analysis that supports it. There's a tremendous amount of momentum to maintain the pre-2020 in-office status quo. That's the world that the people making these decisions know. Every member of the C-suite at my typical Fortune 500 company instead cites vague concerns over spontaneous connections and corporate culture. It certainly doesn't seem like it's based on data, but rather their desire to keep thousands of people working in the environment they happened to have thrived in.
However, I understand why many people do like WFH. I don't understand why this isn't a conversation between the employee and her direct manager? If the direct manager can point to problems with being WFH then I can understand forcing RTO. But if the employee is verifiably productive with good performance ratings, why should she be forced to return to the office?
And this recursively applies all the way up the chain. If a director sees that a manager is falling behind in productivity, then she can drill down on the manager's performance and the performance of the team. But if performance reviews are good, why dictate that someone should be in the office? It's pretty stupid.
This comes up a lot around here in discussions about uncomfortable employer decisions.
The H-1B visa is certainly restrictive, but it is by no means the indentured-servitude visa that people make it out to be.
I’ve hired a fantastic employee who was at the time in the US on an H-1B visa. The process was straightforward. I was at a small startup at the time, so we didn’t have a big hiring team to lean on or anything. There was some friction — we needed to do more paperwork, and that pushed things out by maybe a week or two. And we had to pay lawyers and some filing fees — perhaps $10-15k. Which isn’t nothing, but also is fine if you get a great employee out of the deal.
My understanding of the H-1B visa is that it requires that the visa holder maintains a job matching there description that the visa was issued for, and in the case of a job loss, the visa holder has a (painfully short) 6 weeks to find new employment. So, stressful for sure, but workable, especially with a little planning, as this article suggested in any case.
The L-1, in contrast is (mostly) non-transferable, and the limited transfer options require the original employer to initiate.
I bring this up not to dismiss the stress imposed by the 6-week H-1B unemployment scramble, but rather to remind everyone here (employers and employees alike) that H-1B status doesn’t impose all that much of a hurdle. If you are in the US on one, don’t hold back from applying for new jobs! If you’re hiring, don’t be afraid if you see that a candidate is in the US on a H-1B!
Real estate investment and the idea that large corporate share owners also invest in office real estate has been mentioned as the reason. But to me it mostly feels like a “soft layoff” tactic.
There were waves of layoffs already, but it wasn't enough, so they all noticed that RTC can be another kind of a layoff, and they don't have to worry about severance or inventing performance improvement plans and so on.
It's fascinating that they do it and have to lie why they are doing it. Nobody can say it out-loud. Not a single line in the internal chat or emails, especially no comment publicly. But everyone can read very well between the lines.
If your work is clerical, repetitive, stable, you may sacrifice some pay, work happily remotely and sacrifice serendipity and mentoring if you're starting your career
It's a tradeoff.
The cognitive dissonance when these companies impose "return-to-office" policies is huge. They already made a decision that it's not worth renting enough real estate to have employees in the office 5 days a week, so most of their arguments for the value of in-person work are transparently hypocritical.
2) in some cities (I live in Boston) the commute has gotten much worse than pre-COVID, at least on Tuesday through Thursday. Return-to-office policies aren't asking employees to return to their prior mode of working - they're asking them to spend an additional hour or more commuting than what they originally signed up for.
I dont work from office anymore. At most, in a hybrid way. But if I can avoid steping in a office, I will.
They do not understand that the employer/employee relationship is purely transactional. Employers can fire you at any time, and likewise you can quit at any time.
Only when you accept this, will you understand that employers never owe you anything. Therefore they can’t disappoint you either.
They do not understand that the employer/employee relationship is purely transactional. Employers can fire you at any time, and likewise you can quit at any time.
Only when you accept this, will you understand that employers never owe you anything. Therefore they can’t disappoint you either.
And no, Elon is 100% wrong on this one-- we work just as hard from home, if not harder than developers who work in an office environment, partially due to the fact that we can pick up and work at a moment's notice. I'm surprised he hasn't picked up on this aspect, it's similar to how he sleeps at the factory and can be ready at a moment's notice. I feel like it's causing Tesla to miss out on extremely talented developers who are not located near one of their office locations. They are blowing it big time.
And I suspect this is exactly what the managers want: Decrease headcount and decrease average salaries to make the company look good next quarter. That's what they get rewarded for. They don't get penalized for decreasing the collective talent or productivity of the company in the long term; they get rewarded for decreasing costs in the short term. So that's what they're going to do in the guise of an RTO policy.
It is difficult to measure employee productivity and in particular how productive employees will be after years of remote work. From my subjective experience, remote work is worse from a productivity standpoint and it is hard for me to imagine how it could not be. The communication bandwidth in person is just so much higher. Logistics around scheduling and communication are just way easier. I notice participation in and meaningful discussion in meetings is significantly higher in person. Psychologically, it is easier for me to be motivated and pay attention in person. I have heard others report this but it may just be a matter of personal preference.
That said, I like living where I live, I have connections here, and being asked to move for a job and start over is a massive ask. The older I get the more massive it will become. I would quit my job before relocating if that meant a pay cut. So my employer and I have conflicting interests. They would get more productivity from me if I relocated, but I don't want to.
I am not saying that I am valuable in particular, but there is a significant group of people like me that are part of a remote talent pool. This pool grew quite a bit during the pandemic giving us more leverage. By being willing to hire from this pool companies open themselves up to new talent, often at a better price than they could get in areas where talent is in higher demand. This is not just top talent but also affordable, solid talent. Some employees want to be able to work remotely and if you as a company are willing to deal with the challenges of remote work this can essentially be another form of compensation so you can hire talent you may not be able to otherwise afford.
Right now people are still experimenting and feeling around this new landscape. Companies are testing the water to see what they can get away with. There will probably be some growing pains before we reach a new equilibrium.
What doesn't get discussed enough is the huge financial incentives that cities give to corporations to attract big businesses.
Those incentives (like no corporate taxes for 10-years) are based on companies literally having people physically in-office.
Cities don't want corporations to move "on paper" their HQ.
Cities want the economy benefits of more local jobs, which equals more income & home taxes that follow.
So cities structure corp incentives to having people physically in-office that way it aligns their interests with the corp interest.
As such, companies are forced to bring people back into the office as a result to maintain those tax incentives.
At home I know if I actually focus, I can finish my tasks in less time, and I can enjoy the rest of the day/week.
I’m the office, I am incentivized to drag out work to fill the 8 hours because I need to be in the office that much anyway.
And a lot of management is older folks with kids. A lot of programmers in the age-discriminatory field of tech is ... younger people.
But at the same time, my old job was a cattle pen of open floor concept. That sucked too. Now, right after COVID restrictions were lifted but no one came to the office, man I loved going to the office. No one was there, I could concentrate really well.
Realistically these companies are going to lose out to companies that have embraced remote work. The benefits of not having that expensive downtown real estate and being able to hire talent from anywhere are too good.
Imagine fully-remote Internet dot-com era companies that don't require any hardware, can hire from anywhere in the country or the world, don't need any real estate investment, and can pass the savings onto competitively hiring best talent.
There hasn't been any compelling reason for most internet-only companies like yahoo, google, facebook, etc to have ever waste billions into huge office campuses.
And no, the reason isn't "video conferencing bad".
This was truly transformative for some Eastern European programmers' lives. Doing the work from a developing country where you could get by on 5-10€/day, but making a relatively elite salary, allowed them to begin investing in real estate, which has brought great prosperity and security.
In general 2 site meetings are needed to talk with business ops, and pair up on key challenges.
Remote work becomes less productive with time. People re-discover the 7% rule in text communication (93% of meaning is nonverbal). Also, video chats are about as productive as conferences... fine for 1-to-n instruction... but terrible for n-to-n collaboration.
Admittedly, I'd likely bail too... if forced to go to an office 2 hours away for something non-fun... lol =)
By now, though, a company has no excuse for not having sorted out who needs to be in the office in order to remain employed. It isn’t everyone, it needs to be handled on a case by case basis, and if a manager can’t figure out if their employees are producing anything after 3 years, what are they managing?
I wish a social assistance service existed for tech workers where we pay a small monthly amount in and receive support for bills if we are fired for refusing RTO and being laid off. Such a group service would seriously blunt the sharpness of the sword at our throats by these bosses who think they have all the power.
If Musk tells me to come back to work, well ok. But I've done lots of work for F500s and my response to them is "do you deserve having me in the office for more than just paycheck leverage?" Maybe, but in my experience not really.
Acting like there are no benefits to in person work is silly. One of the first things we did as a company going remote was to say that if anyone is on zoom in a meeting then everyone in the meeting needs to be on zoom even if many were physically in the same place. I don't think anyone would ever choose to sit in a conference room with 5 other people all on zoom together.
Everything is tradeoffs. Remote work just got a huge profile boost which is going to give a lot of people the opportunity to live life differently from how they did before. Now the pendulum is swinging back but it'll never get as far as it did before.
And yet...
Of course our employers love unpaid commutes - commutes that we actually pay for ourselves! What a racket.
If it's less than what it costs to sue you, you won't even have to do that.
It's not framed as a debate but an expectation, and an overdue one at that.
zu must return to ze office and zu must sit in ze pod for 8 hours or zu vill be fired!
I can't imagine a quicker "kthxbye".
It’ll be interesting to see how this is handled.
My company is doing RTO after claiming WFH was the new normal. We haven't seen any decrease in productivity. Is it because WFH gives employees too many choices?
Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback.
Dutch proverb
Inflation does not work that way!